Redux: A Dead World at Sunset

By: | October 1, 2014

This was first published in March of 2011. As winter descends upon the sub-Arctic once more, I revisit these moments of awe on a frozen lake.
“It may not strike you as a marvel; it would not, perhaps, unless you were standing in the middle of a dead world at sunset, but that was where I stood.”

I’ve been carrying that sentence around in my head, semi-colon and all,  for years. Set down by the phenomenal nature writer and anthropologist Loren Eiseley, it referred to a flock of geese flying overhead during a solitary excursion into the fossil yards of the Badlands. It easily could describe any such moment of wonder in the wilderness – the starting point or rallying incident for many a career of scientific inquiry. Last week, I had a close encounter that brought me back to Loren Eiseley’s visceral approach to field observation.

It happens about a block away from my house, if that length can be applied to a short distance along a frozen lake, and it begins with a huge, gorgeous dog tearing across the snow in my precise direction from the Northwest corner of Yellowknife’s Frame Lake, where the highway jogs out to the airport.

I look around for the owner, perhaps unseen around the next bay. From the single-minded dash of the dog, they must be calling furiously. I hear nothing but a distant skidoo.

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Those Who Emerged from the Earth

By: | September 30, 2014

shutterstock_81860095As we know by now, science is not the last word on anything. It is one story among many, and it alone doesn’t satisfy every inquiry.

Over the last few years I’ve been visiting landscapes associated with the Bering land bridge in western Alaska. Most archaeologists believe this is where the first people crossed from Asia to North America in the late Pleistocene, a theory which has been bolstered by recent genetic ties found between modern Native America and Asian haptolytpes. But there is more than one way of telling a story of human arrival.

Nikki Cooley, a Navajo river guide from Northern Arizona, told me she didn’t believe in the land bridge, at least not as the origin of Native American ancestry. To her, the migration from Asia to North America never happened. Her people, she said, came from the ground. This she learned from her elders, who learned it from theirs, a bloodline much closer to the first people than most scientists who are telling their very different, empirical story. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Planning to Sprawl

By: | September 29, 2014

800px-East_LA_Basin_from_MulhollandI’ve been teaching undergraduates for a while now, various takes on the general theme of the environment and society.  Here are some things I’ve noticed. The students often believe that they have discovered the environment and all the bad things we are doing in it.  Up to now, they suppose, we have been unaware, self-centered and lazy, so we drive everywhere, recklessly leave the lights on and never give a thought to our carbon footprint. They also seem to believe that if they just go out and tell everyone, we will stop misbehaving.

Don’t get me wrong.  I think it’s great that they are on a mission to save the earth.  We should all be on such a mission.  I want them to understand what they are really up against, though, so they can be more effective.

My students – and a lot of environmentalists – focus on our individual behaviors: if we would all just bike to work and eat local organic food, things would get better.  This isn’t wrong.  Our choices matter and Americans, plainly, could consume far less than they do without suffering.  But there’s a hitch – or, rather, three hitches.  One is that while Americans may be, on the whole, overstuffed, much of the rest of the world needs more, not less: more industry, more energy, more food, more clean water.  A second is that a capitalist economic system needs to grow to survive.  This isn’t a policy option.  If you think capitalism is going to be around for a while, which I do, we have to figure out another way of being sane in nature.  Lastly, we don’t have unlimited degrees of freedom in our choices whatever our intentions.  We get to choose, sure, but our choices are structured by larger social realities.  Try living without a car in Los Angeles.

Aha!  Isn’t LA the perfect example of how we chose suburban sprawl, trapping ourselves in our cars?  All of the familiar post-war phenomena – the GI Bill, Levittown, white flight, the interstate highway system – allowed us to maroon ourselves in ways that we may now regret but couldn’t have foreseen.  Continue reading →

Last Word

By: | September 27, 2014

AndyKaufman2September 22-26, 2014

Erik makes the case that Donald Trump is actually a performance artist — Andy Kaufman in disguise.

Ann explained how it happened that between 1993 and 2013 about 10 percent of American electricity came from the Russian nuclear program. “You don’t just propose an idea,” the man responsible for the program says, “you go do something about it.”

Richard catalogued some of the errors and myths found in a wall panel at the Galileo museum and posits that myths take hold when they seem to reinforce a useful universal lesson. “They endure if we really want to believe that lesson.”

In between trips to the loo, guest Jennifer Holland wondered what exactly is in that stuff used to clear out one’s bowels prior to a colonoscopy.

Michelle told us the story of Lonesome Larry, a dead sockeye salmon who recently toured the state of Idaho.

 

The Legacy of Lonesome Larry

By: | September 26, 2014

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This story has a happy ending. I promise.

Every year before the turn of the last century, some 150,000 sockeye salmon made an epic journey: They traveled from the Pacific Ocean up the Columbia River, hung a right into the Snake, a left into the Salmon, and finally, after swimming upstream for 900 miles, arrived in the clear, icy waters of central Idaho’s Redfish Lake. In late summer and early fall, the lake was so thick with sockeye that white settlers named it after the fishes’ scales, which turn from silvery-blue to brilliant red in breeding season. But in 1913, a new dam on the Salmon blocked fish access to Redfish Lake. After the Sunbeam Dam was blown up in 1934, the sockeye began to return, but their numbers were still recovering in 1962, when the first large federal dam went up across their migratory route in the Snake River. Eventually, four large dams were built across their route in the Snake, and another four across the Columbia.

The tens of thousands of sockeye that had struggled upstream to Redfish Lake each year became a few thousand, and then to few hundred, and then a few dozen. In 1991, there were four. In 1992, there was one.

His name was Lonesome Larry, and while his life was unlucky, his death was quite another matter.

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The Writings on the Wall

By: | September 25, 2014

 

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You’d think a wall panel in the Galileo gallery in the Galileo wing of the Galileo Museum would be a good place to get an accurate context for Galileo’s historical significance.

You’d be wrong:

“These astronomical discoveries heralded a revolution destined to demolish an image of the universe that had lasted for two thousand years. The profound shock of that revolution, undermining faith in man’s privileged position in the universe, aroused violent antagonism that was to claim Galileo himself as victim.”

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

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Guest Post: Another Kind of Coming Out Story

By: | September 24, 2014
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IF ONLY. But no, my prep drink didn’t make me feel like this.

So, today I’ll be writing about my colonoscopy.

Now wait, please don’t close this page! I promise not to dig too deep…er, I mean, I won’t get too mired in…oops, well, let’s just say I’ll try not to say a whole lot about poop. My real interest right now is actually in the “bowel prep.” Specifically, why does this particular prep drink taste like bubblegum flavored vinegar with two cups of salt and a bad egg? I’ve had this test before and the prep, while icky, wasn’t as foul as this one. With some ice cubes, a slosh of ginger ale, and a straw, I could almost pretend it was a new summer drink that I wouldn’t be ordering again. Continue reading →

Weapons-Grade Private Enterprise

By: | September 23, 2014

Spent_nuclear_fuel_hanfordOver the years, I’ve met a number of physicists who had direct or indirect connections with the Manhattan Project and who then spent the rest of their lives trying to get the nuclear weapons genie back into the bottle and the bottle corked.  I think of these physicists as the old arms-controllers. They’re impressive people. They’re not so much uncheery as they are highly focused on the job of corking the genie.  Like, they’re pushing 90 years old and still stumping around full of current and complex information, giving talks and publishing things and backing politicians into corners.

I’ve just read about one (I’m pretty sure he qualifies as an old arms-controller though like others of them, he’s a little opaque to the all-seeing eye of Google) named Thomas Neff.  I’m reviewing a book about nuclear weapons. I learned that during the Cold War, the world had 65,000 nuclear warheads and around 2,000 tons of the fissile stuff – mostly weapons-grade uranium and some plutonium — that make nuclear warheads so effective.

All this stuff had to be made:  weapons-grade uranium is processed, or enriched, from lesser uranium; and plutonium is manufactured outright.  God didn’t make this stuff; we did.  It’s all over the place; it’s proliferated to all corners of the earth; most of it is in Russia, the U.S. comes second.  And once made, the stuff can’t be unmade; it can’t be destroyed.  We’re stuck with it.  You have to wonder why God doesn’t get disgusted and just shut down the whole stupid human endeavor, another Flood maybe.

Until Thomas Neff, a physicist/non-proliferation expert at MIT, figured out how the situation might be improved with a little private enterprise. Continue reading →